


Hand of God

by orphan_account



Category: AFI
Genre: Black Sails/AOD era, Burials Era, M/M, Mentions of het, New Years Eve, Recording, frat house, xtrmst - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-03-01 23:26:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2791574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>reach out and touch faith</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hand of God

**Author's Note:**

> I received two prompts: the nostalgically mentioned nye Davey and Jade stayed home to write, and the recording process of XTRMST. I don't think the prompter expected or wanted these prompts to happen in the same story. I know I didn't. But that's what ended up happening.
> 
> I hope this works as well as I think it does. I don't own them and this never happened.

Jade keeps wringing his hands. Davey keeps watching. It’s the only thing he can see; he’s blind to the sterile walls of Jade’s home studio, where their past successes hang in glass frames, accusing eyes like church windows. Two platinum records, gold records. Reminders of what he used to think pain was, back when his pain was pure and obsidian and he could sink beneath the surface of that black water without making himself sick with age. Jade wrings his hands. 

They haven’t said much; its easy to be quiet like this. Writing and recording together creates an uneasy peace between them, as if the music is one great hand reaching down between their bodies to smooth the decade’s worth of ripples that has grown there in the space which keeps them separate. It’s one of the only times when Davey does not feel alone. Writing with Jade has always been like this, somehow. 

“Should we get started?” Jade asks. 

Davey cracks his neck. It’s a sound he hates. He tears his eyes away from Jade’s strangling hands and to the mic he’s supposed to be screaming into. Jade lets go of himself for a moment to turn on some equipment, flicking on switches and adjusting knobs and dials, plugging things in. It’s a process Davey is willfully ignorant to: the electronic, mechanized side of music. He tells himself it’s because he wants to be the raw element, the human element to the tragedies he and Jade cannot stop writing together like reflexes. He wants to be the soul. 

Part of him knows that the real reason why is because he must write his dependency upon Jade into their music. He relies fully on Jade to become realized, so he must prevent his voice from being heard the way he wishes it to be heard without Jade. 

“Yeah. Let’s do it,” He tells Jade, making a fist with one hand. 

\---

_Davey’s skin crawls under the death in the air as he walks down Channing, synthetic leather jacket creaking where his shoulders are bunched around his ears. It’s cold and the downhill slap of his soles against the pavement hurts distantly, like the muscle under a week old tattoo, like muscle memory from some half-remembered injury. He’s walking with friends, but he feels acutely alone._

_He has an image of Jade burnt into his mind from when he left Delta a few minutes ago. Jade shirtless and slouching in his sweats, barefoot, hair awry as he leans in the doorframe of their shared bedroom, smirking and drawling, “have fun.” His brain is stuck on this image in a desperate, longing loop. Jade is why Davey feels alone right now, why all other company fades into smoke, half-forgotten._

_Davey knows he’s in love with Jade. He’s not stupid. It was one of those things that snuck up on him, like a holiday, like the new year. Snuck up fast and insidious and now it’s too late to do anything about it, to resist or reason. He holds it at night between insomniac palms, and examines it. Marvels at how something so elemental could have formed inside of him, how it could have been hiding there all this time,i n his blood type, his genes._

_He doesn’t try to feed it or starve it. He just writes with Jade, and watches with stunned fascination as it grows._

\---

One take of one song and Davey is wet. He doesn’t want to ruin his shirt, it’s a Ann Demeulemeester, black with a velour micro-dot pattern, and he’s ruined expensive things with sweat before. He carefully unbuttons it, tugging the sleeves from his damp, sticky arms. He folds it and places it on the counter, wishing he had brought a hanger but unwilling to ask Jade if he can borrow one from a closet choked with peplum dresses and high waisted pencil skirts that belong to something he will never understand. He notices that Jade’s back is to him as he carries out this ritual, like he doesn’t want to see the heart engulfed in flames today. 

“How did it sound?” He asks, loud enough to be heard over the headphones Jade is wearing to listen to the cut. Jade has a furrowed brow, hunched shoulders. He removes the headphones and hangs them around his neck, heavy like an albatross. 

“Like it hurt,” is his answer. He doesn’t look at Davey, his eyes still fixed on his laptop screen. 

“It did,” Davey answers. He finds a gym towel in the duffel bag he brought, uses it to blot his neck and jawline even though it smells sour and ancient and his stomach turns as he touches his skin with it. He cracks open a Blk water bottle and swigs messily. It stings over his already aching throat. 

“How does your ink taste?” Jade asks dryly. 

Davey ignores him, watching the bony grip of Jade’s knuckles tighten around his other wrist. His heart is pounding, the fine, clipped hair behind his ears cold with sweat. The air feels hard to breathe. He’s sure he can do this, do it again, do it until his esophagus is eroded and bleeding and there’s nothing left to scream. His certainty comes from watching Jade’s lack of certainty. This doesn’t happen anywhere outside the careful vacuum of civility their collaboration creates. 

He screws the cap to his water bottle back on and sets it down beside his feet in their custom Nicora Johns tapered toe wingtips. “Let’s do it again,” he says. 

\---

_The sun sets. Berkeley becomes steadily more grey the further Davey moves down Channing, away from Delta Chi’s peeling white porch, the color and the brilliance draining from the sunset as he walks._

_His friends are talking about some show they all went to last weekend, some show he didn’t to go because there is nothing he wants to do besides follow Jade into any room and lock the door behind them so he can plunge his hands elbow deep into the ribcage of songwriting. It’s all there is in the world. It feels like he’s spent his whole life living in a doll house, and songwriting with Jade is the massive, glittering universe which exists outside of it. Where the hand of God lies, where he can escape it by becoming it. Davey does not believe in God, so it must be his hand, outstretched, reaching towards Jades, wishing so badly to twine fingers._

_The air smells like fog rolling in from the bay, but underneath that familiar ghost there’s smoke, beer, champagne puke. There are drunk people already in the streets, sorority girls in American flag bikinis, guys wearing jester hats with chests painted in sweating Cal colors, hooting and pumping their fists in the air as they celebrate the years death. Davey thinks it’s strange that New Years Eve parties are basically just socially a acceptable funeral parties. People pretend that it’s about the New Year, but it’s not. It’s about the dead year, the dying year. About doing everything you wished you had done for the last 365 days in one electric night. Davey hates New Years Eve._

_He thinks of what he wants to do, and knows it lies behind him, shirtless and slouching in his sweats, barefoot, hair awry as he leans in the doorframe of their shared bedroom, smirking and drawling, “Have fun.”_

\---

Davey’s chest is burning and he cannot breathe. He makes Jade open the rest of the doors and windows in the house so that he can get a cross breeze, and sits on the stool before the mic downing the rest of his ink. Sweat runs down his bare chest in rivulets, between his pectoral muscles, collecting on the thin dusting of hair between his navel and the waistband of his slacks. He rubs a palm over it, panting, sick, lost. He’s buzzing with adrenaline, and half of him feels like breaking something. The other half feels broken. It feels like being alive, like playing God, like repenting. 

Jades comes back and the tips of his fingers are blackened with window-ledge dust. There’s a bathroom off the side of the studio, and Jade leaves the door of it open as he washes his hands. Davey stares. His stomach drops as Jade struggles to pull his wedding ring off of his finger. Drops like an elevator with the cables cut, drops like cormorant into the sea. Jade sets the ring down on the edge of the sink, almost carelessly. 

Davey aches to see that the skin usually hidden beneath it is paler than the rest of Jade’s already pale hand. A strip of corpse-white Davey wants to disappear; he is forever longing to stain Jade’s vacancies with his own darkness. Fill in Jade’s empty spaces with black, with blood, blotting them out like they had never been there at all. He imagines putting Jade’s finger in his mouth, chewing the skin so everything is reddened by his teeth.

Jade soaps his palms, rubbing them together, satisfying and slick, then rinses them. Dries them. Davey’s eyes drink in the scene, Jade’s naked wrists and the curve of his spine like a question mark as he bends. Davey is waiting for his heart to slow, but that’s not what’s happening. His throat burns like he swallowed. All of his creases are still hot and wet, and he has been screaming, _screaming_ , making, creating, painting the night with the hand of God, and Jade took off his wedding ring. He stands. 

\---

_Davey decides he’s not going to follow his friends to a party when everything he wants is behind him. They protest, but weakly. People invite Davey to come to parties because he’s fun. Since he’s not fun tonight, not to them, they don’t care if he comes or not. Davey is used to people responding to him like this, finding him novel, amusing, absurd, disposable. It’s how people respond to his darkness. To his art._ Wow, you’re deep. This is heavy shit. But it’s like, really poetic and stuff. _He’s used to being a source of confusion, resentment. People wanting to be near to him without actually being close. Envying him for his talent, his charm._ We hate it when our friends become successful. 

_This is how Jade initially drew him in. He’s not used to someone responding to his darkness, his art, with recognition. With hunger, with an echo, with a melody. With his impossible fingers on the neck of his guitar, creating the musical counterpart to Davey’s interior. Jade plays Davey’s insides, the perfect rendition of something unspeakable, unfathomable. There was no way to escape something like that._

_Davey says goodbye, gives a few one armed hugs. Then he starts walking back up Channing, an elated burn on his chest in the shape of Jade’s silhouette. He thinks of the smell in Jade’s dirty hair, the blunt, chipped nails he wants to chew off in his own mouth, the miraculous end to his own loneliness. Davey used to think he was loneliness. Now he’s realizing he was only lonely._

_He never really thought he would meet someone there, in the valley of that loneliness. Jade surprised him. Jade keeps surprising him. It feels like the universe being born. An explosion of matter in a vacant void, forever expanding. He’s so stunned by the miracle of having fallen in love that even if it never evolves past what they have right now, awe at one another’s art and Davey knowing he would give Jade anything he ever asked of him, that is enough. He’s nearly content that Jade will probably never ask for everything he’s willing to give. He thinks it’s a thing he can live with, never having quite all of Jade._

_Davey jogs the final block up to Delta Chi, and unlocks the door with numb fingers._

\---

Hands clean, Jade stands up straight and turns to face Davey. He finds him inches away, flushed and sweating and fixed like the axis of a planet in orbit. Jade stops. 

Davey isn’t sure what he’s doing, what he wants, but his hands decide for him, the right reaching pointedly for Jade’s neck. The pale slip of it with its chapped looking razor burn, the puckering of age at the jawline, the flickering bob of his adam’s apple. Davey slams Jade’s thin, passive body into the wall of the bathroom by his throat, all the rage and power of a decade and more tempered in his arm. Jade flinches, but nothing else. 

Panting, Davey takes time to really feel it. The ridges and whorls of cartilage, the small tremors of resistance and the quickening of blood thrumming beneath his thumb. Jade’s weak, reedy voice retches out, “What are you gonna do, Dave?” and it vibrates against Davey’s fingers. 

Davey’s breath shakes. The fear and tension he used to feel in Jade’s skin is gone, replaced with resignation, defeat, acceptance. It’s infuriating. He tightens his fist, pushes his chest to Jade’s and his thigh between his legs, forcing Jade to feel the power of his body for himself, the untapped well of fury and strength, a body which can still scream, as purely and loudly as it did ten years ago. There are violent spots of color on Jade’s cheeks, but he will not resist him, will not fight. 

Davey can stay here forever. He can stay here until Jade’s lips turn blue and he will kiss them back to life, take away beauty only so that he can restore it again as a gift. So Jade cannot live without him, cannot experience beauty without him, just as Davey cannot experience beauty without Jade. He is so angry, sick with wrath, powerful with it, and he wants to pour it into Jade, down his throat. It’s not fair that this can happen, that they can write together and it calms the storm, sews their skins, soothes and stings and sutures. Davey hates it. He wants Jade to hear him always, not just when he is screaming. He cannot survive not having all of Jade.

“Dave,” Jade wheezes, without panic. He’s drooling from the left corner of his mouth, and Davey bends to lick it away. It almost feels like a kiss, and that changes everything. 

His hand relents. Fingers flickering to slackness, leaving white spots on Jade’s skin for blood to reoccupy. Jade collapses against him, weightless like an insect’s shed husk of exoskeleton. He hangs onto Davey, long fingers combing up through sweat-damp hair, thumbs stretching to smooth the crease through his brow. 

The dam of feeling protected by his screams breaks. Davey lets his head sink to Jade’s shoulder, and makes a loose fist in Jade’s teeshirt. Davey cedes to the hands of God. 

\---

_Jade’s in Delta’s common room, still shirtless and messy, idly picking at the Les Paul in his lap. Davey stands in the doorjamb and Jade’s gaze snaps up at him like he’s surprised, eyes big and black and hands shuddering to a graceful stop. He looks like he’s been caught doing something private by the way his cheeks color. It makes Davey’s stomach tighten._

_“You’re back,” Jade says. “Forget something?”_

_Davey shakes his head. “I just didn’t want to go anymore.”_

_Jade grins, slow, sly. He does this sometimes, edges into the space Davey grants him and silently begs for him to occupy. If Jade wasn’t Jade, and Jade was some blue-haired girl he’d just met in line at Slims, or some shirtless stumbling Folsom street boy, Davey would think it was flirting. But he isn’t so it can’t be. People don’t flirt with the same person they share everything else with, too, unless it means something. It doesn’t seem like flirting when he stands in Jade’s shadow, when he catches his eyes across the room when they’re playing and he smiles like a crack of lightening across a New Mexico sky. It seems like the truth._

_“Oh yeah? You want to spend your bangin’ new years eve with me?” Jade says fondly. His face is still flushed, a flush Davey wants to chase down his neck, with his teeth. He smiles hard, wide, stupid, and clutches his keys so tightly in his hands he can feel the edge of them cutting into his palm._

_“Yeah. I wanted to have fun tonight, and maybe if I went I would...but I just. I dunno. I hate New Years Eve,” Davey explains, chucking his jacket and plopping down next to Jade on the sagging brown 70s couch. He closes his eyes, left the outside of his calf push into Jade’s thigh. It feels like two planes of the earth rubbing at a fault line._

_“Dude, me too,” Jade sighs. “Since I stopped drinking there’s just like, no appeal.”_

_Davey smiles. It’s something he can’t stop doing now that he decided to stay. “Thats why I’m here with you, and not out there,” He adds, eyes flicking to Jade. It feels like something secret passes between them, something half-formed and wordless. Jade smiles back, crookedly._

_“You feel like writing instead?”_  
\---  
The smell of Jade’s skin is devastatingly foreign. He’s wearing some new cologne, some new aftershave, and Davey’s chest wracks with a dry sob for this stranger he’s pinning to the wall. 

“Hey. Hey. It’s okay, I know this is hard,” Jade keeps mumbling variations of this lie and Davey doesn’t even know what he’s talking about. If he thinks that screaming is hard, sharing air with the biggest loss of his life is hard, or this, _this_. All of it. The decade it took to bring them here, two pairs of hands which tried to pull strings and are now just gripping one another until they turn from bone to dust. 

Davey rubs his face into Jade’s neck, opens his mouth on rough skin and licks and sucks until it smells sharp and organic like his own spit. The way Jade’s neck is supposed to smell. Their breath quickens, falls in erratic huffs between them and it’s not until Davey is more than half-hard that he realizes he’s been thrusting steadily against Jade’s narrow thigh, its shuddering expanse of muscle. 

Jade pretends to hold Davey at a distance. His hand with its endless bony fingers, terrible and skeletal, tightens around Davey’s throat, kneading, pushing, resisting in bursts of noncommittal pressure. Davey grinds his chin into Jade’s hand, lets his mouth fill up with hot, frothy saliva Jade forces up with his spasming grip. It feels so fucking good. To hold Jade’s life in his hand, to feel his own life bubble and ripple between Jade’s fingers. To manifest the eternal damnation between their two hands of God, to choke, to scream. Davey’s hips stutter and jerk against Jade’s. Jade whose cheeks are shining and wet, and Davey’s not sure where it’s coming from. 

They don’t fuck anymore unless they’re writing songs for something, and even then it’s not really fucking, not like it used to be, when Davey felt like his body was forever drinking from a well that was Jade. Now it’s only moments like this, spit and teeth and a habit of not leaving marks so long practiced Davey doesn’t leave marks anymore. Moments where Jade’s eyes close and his cheeks are slicked in wet and he sinks to the floor after he comes because they usually begin standing. They don’t fuck anymore unless they’re writing songs for something. They’re almost always writing songs for something. Neither of them knows how to stop. 

Davey unzips his pants, pulls up Jade’s shirt, and fits the length of himself against the hollow of Jade’s hip. 

\---

_“Of course,” Davey answers. It’s all he wants to do. It is the real world outside the dollhouse._

_“Cool,” Jade says quietly, dropping his gaze and moving his hands around on his guitar, plucking and picking at its body as if it’s something new, something he’s never spent the time to explore before, something he doesn’t spend hours a day playing. “I wasn’t actually looking forward to spending the night by myself. Believe it or not.”_

_“I believe it,” Davey says._

_They stare at each other, locked, and there is no real reason this moment feels like the eye of a storm created by one year’s death and another’s birth, but it does. Davey’s mouth goes dry, and the universe is whittled down to this point. Davey feels moved by the hand of god. There is no god. He is moved by the way Jade’s hand moves, skeletal and pale and terrible, closing around the neck of his guitar. He chokes it, and Davey shuts his eyes again, feeling his own air stutter and die in his throat._

_Unsteadily, he rises to follow Jade up the stairs, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides, feeling as if they could create anything, fashion anything, break anything, choke anything. Jade’s back stretches before him, pale and mapped with constellations of freckles Davey wishes he could connect with the tip of his index finger from memory. Davey cannot play an instrument, so instead, he plays God._

\--

When Jade’s breath catches, Davey pushes his forearm into his windpipe to silence him. He doesn’t want Jade to react any more than he is already reacting. He want to ride this liminal space, where he can believe the myth they’ve both written where Davey is the one more stricken with want, he is the dreamer, the fool. This way he can come mired in his own self pity, crucified by his own construct of unrequited desperation. The second he feels Jade wanting him back, everything is lost. 

Jade must stay like this. Passive. Patronizing. Still against the wall, inanimate heat which Davey can rub himself off on, but nothing else. He cannot want Davey back, he cannot cave beneath the pressure or the rage, or else Davey’s own want will collapse, the jagged ruins ripping through the fiction of their unbalanced dynamic. Davey can only sustain desire if he thinks that desire is something denied. It’s how he manages to survive not having all of Jade. 

Sputtering and red faced beneath the pressure of Davey’s flexing arm, Jade hums, he bucks for air, hot skin sweatslick against the head of Davey’s dick. The struggle could almost be perceived as resistance, from an outsider perhaps, and it makes Davey’s stomach roil with the nearness of orgasm. He rolls his hips, he chokes Jade. He bites his own wrist, right beside the candy hearts, and Jade maybe tries to push him off, maybe tries to create more friction. It’s hard to tell. Davey knows they are hewn from the same sorrow, chipped from the same ice, that it’s not only Jade’s hand drawing his fate out in the stars but a game of cat’s cradle with one string and twenty fingers grasping for it, but he has to forget that right now. He just wants to come, he wants to scream and he wants Jade to be wordless, capable only of writing Davey’s insides, building the harmony to cradle his words, forever dependent. 

Jade gags, a low scraping sound deep in his throat. Davey’s hips stutter and lock, and then he’s empty, everything once held now hot and wet between their heaving bodies. As he rides it to its end, it forgets to let out the sound building in his raw throat. Instead, he swallows it. 

He lets Jade go. Jade doubles at the waist, sucking in air noisily, desperately, hungrily, red-faced as one long, half-foam string of drool drops in slow motion from his swollen mouth to the tile floor of the bathroom. 

Davey braces himself against the wall with a quaking arm, Jade on his knees before him, as if in prayer. They don’t say anything to one another.They just breathe, labored and hoarse. Then Davey remembers to scream. 

\---

_The room they share is too messy to discern their taste from one another. Clothing lies in tangled monochrome heaps, most of it Davey’s but some of it Jade’s. The records are a mess, stacks atop stacks resting upon the turntable and on the floor beside it. The room is a city of towers made from jewel cases and Jade’s old text books and Davey’s tattered paperback poetry volumes he pretends to read._

_Jade’s air mattress on the floor four feet or so away from the edge of Davey’s box spring seems like an afterthought. It always does. Jade sleeps there but they always write in Davey’s bed, play chess in Davey’s bed, lie inches apart as the sun comes up and lose their voices talking about everything in Davey’s bed. It was in Davey’s bed where Jade reached out across the divide to take Davey’s hand in his own once, when they were confessing their shared understanding of that funny feeling, that itch down by the wrists that only a razor blade will scratch. It was in Davey’s bed where they wrote their first song for the new record together. Davey has started referring to it as_ their _bed, at least in his own mind._

_“You have ideas?” Davey asks._

_“Too many,” Jade answers, and half-smiles. “You fill me up with them.”_

_Davey looks hard at Jade, who eventually looks away. “But I was working on this before you cam, mostly just playing around with harmonics. Not sure if it’s anything, but we can start there.”_

_Jade plucks at his guitar absently as he explains, sprawled at the foot of_ their _bed. Then he takes a deep breath, and places more intention behind his hands. Davey can see the change, the shift from nothing to something, from mortal to more. Now Jade’s watching Davey, not his own fingers. The year is dying around them, and Davey wants to create a beginning, he wants to bring matter into the void. His whole being trembles with it, this vast, yawning potential buzzing between them like a scream building in his throat._

_His hand flutters out into the space between their almost touching knees, and he begins to hum. It’s 1998, but not for much longer. Their eyes are locked like two fists entwined, there are funeral parties happening in more than half the houses between Bancroft and Haste, and Jade is looking back at him like he is the northern star. Davey sucks in a ragged inhale, and everything begins._

\---

Jade keeps wringing his hands. His wedding ring is still sitting on the edge of the sink, an endless circle of self imposed judgement like the eye of God, but neither of them speak of it. It’s as if the ocean has closed over their head, as if they are cold and silent on the seafloor while a city’s worth of salt-water bears down upon them with the weight of a decade. The weight of everything they could have been when it was still just an idea, a wish made by two boys in 1998 who thought they were gods, before the double platinum, before the gold. 

But everything ends. And here they are. Some days Davey thinks it is better this way. But on the days like today when he doesn’t, he has a hard time remembering why he sometimes does. His skin feels stretched out and sensitive, burning against the inseam of his slacks, and he places one trembling palm over his own heart as if to quiet the sensation. 

The other hand he offers to Jade, still crumpled and wheezing at his feet. Jade takes it.


End file.
